Cooperation Main Goal Of New Valley Chamber Head

Loren Mitchell has no problem setting up home wherever he makes it.

The new president of the Spokane Valley Chamber of Commerce comes to the Valley from Coeur d’Alene, but he has lived in more places than he can count on both hands.

There’s Brooklyn, of course, where he was born 57 years ago. Then there was Alabama, Florida, Texas, California, Mississippi and North Carolina. Tack on Pakistan, Afghanistan, Vietnam, Cambodia and Saudi Arabia. And don’t forget North Idaho.

Now that Mitchell is moving to the Valley, he sees his next mission as creating stronger ties between his new home and his most recent one.

Mitchell has asked chamber board members from the Valley, Post Falls and Coeur d’Alene to sit in on each others’ meetings to learn about problems they all face. The first meeting is scheduled for next month.

“You see a lot of people working on similar problems. It might make a little difference seeing others doing the same things,” Mitchell said. “Normally board of directors conduct business in a tight environment and don’t let others in. This will give insight into each others’ techniques.”

The Valley chamber’s board selected Mitchell to head up the 750-member business organization for that very reason, said chairman Robert Henry.

Last September, the board said it wanted to form stronger relations with North Idaho.

“It’s something the board wanted to do. It’s part of our long-range plan,” he said. “Loren hits it right on the head when he says we’re one economic region.”

Kerri Thorenson, executive director of the Post Falls Chamber of Commerce, said the idea is an admirable one.

Currently heads of the 350-member Post Falls chamber and the 1,000-member Coeur d’Alene chamber meet informally with the Valley executive.

“Loren wants to take it to the next level,” she said. “This would expand it more so than having us (directors) interact.”

But each organization must still focus on its members, she said. That means the Post Falls chamber would still prefer that a company to locate in that city rather than Spokane, Coeur d’Alene or the Valley to have an immediate impact on the community.

“We all still have to be dedicated to our specific intentions,” she said. “It’s a healthy competition.”

Those who know him say Mitchell, a former electrical engineer, has a healthy dose of enthusiasm.

“I hire for attitude,” said Coeur d’Alene chamber manager Pat McGaughey, who hired Mitchell a year ago as the chamber’s membership sales director. “Everything else is based on performance.”

Most say you’ll never see him without a smile. Mitchell says it’s simple: “I found my passion.”

And it’s not as if he hasn’t tried about everything to find it.

While attending college at the University of Southern Mississippi, Mitchell joined the Air Force in 1957. He worked for the National Security Agency while in the Air Force from 1963 to 1965 and lived in Pakistan as an intelligence officer.

Then he moved to Huntsville, Ala., in 1965 to work for Boeing and NASA on the Saturn V mission.

“It taught me a great deal of respect of what can and cannot be accomplished with computers.”

He then left Boeing and went to Houston to work at the Johnson Space Center for Systems Engineering Laboratories doing more high-tech work.

From Houston, he moved to Dallas and then to Southern California to work for Redcor, a computer firm. After Redcor filed for bankruptcy in 1971, Mitchell joined some former colleagues at a start-up computer firm in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.

For two years, he traveled back and forth between the California and Florida. In 1973, the company asked him to relocate.

“I declined. I did not want to move again,” he said.

So Mitchell started his own computer electronic company in 1974. But 10 years later, he was tired of working 15 hours a day seven days a week. He never saw his two daughters. He said the long hours were the cause of his divorce.

In 1984 he become a salesman for Advanced Digital Group and worked there for five years.

That lasted until he visited friends living in Coeur d’Alene and fell in love with the area. He moved to North Idaho nine years ago with his wife, Pat.

In Coeur d’Alene, he and his brother, Don, who also moved from California, started a sign business called Dam Good Signs. They ran that business until the fall of 1997. Mitchell then joined the Coeur d’Alene chamber fulltime as the membership sales director.

For now, as Mitchell acculturates to a new position, he brings a perspective shaped from travels: That people are all the same, no matter where they live.

“You see problems crop up that people think are unique. If you look over the world, they’re not that unique. If people get together, they could solve them.”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Photo